I added a section to the IF Comp 2015 page on the IFWiki for links to post-mortems:
ifwiki.org/index.php/21st_An … st-Mortems
Please add any that I missed!
Emily Short had added most of these links (and I added a few others) on a section of the Craft IFWiki page, but it’s true that that section is becoming very long and it’s not obvious that it’s there if you don’t know where to find it.
Would someone with an account there mind changing the listing for mine (Brain Guzzlers) so it doesn’t say “post-mortem”? I posted some thoughts afterwards, but they definitely weren’t a “post-mortem”…I’d like to do a revised release at some point, and I don’t think the game is dead and gone just because the competition is over! I hope people will still discover and play it in the future.
I tried to make an account to change it myself, but apparently you have to answer a riddle to register? The question was “what is the other magic word?” I tried ‘thank you’, ‘abracadabra’, and ‘avada kedavra’, but none of those were it. Have we reached the point where captchas are so advanced that even humans can’t understand them?
Fixed, and sorry about that. We’ve come to use “post-mortem” for a lot of discussions about creative process up to initial release, and perhaps I’ve become oblivious to any negative connotations it might hold for authors.
I imagine the captcha is looking for “plugh”.
Heh, yeah. You’re supposed to answer “xyzzy” first, and it goes “No, the OTHER magic word”. It’s cute!
It’s also starting to get obscure, so it’s less useful as a captcha, but it’s still cute!
Well, maybe, but if you don’t know whatever game that’s from it’s pretty frustrating. I feel like if there’s an effort to reach new audiences for IF then requiring you to be familiar with decades-old references to sign up for the wiki is a little counterproductive >__<
Thank you for fixing it, Emily! I guess that’s the word most people are fine with using, I just really don’t like to think of my work that way. It’s so cold and gruesome sounding (to me)
Oh, it definitely has to change. Things moved on, and that’s no longer obvious. Even if it changed to “please”, it’d make more sense.
But I’ll be sorry to see it go, even if also I did struggle with it a bit a few days ago. It’s so cute! It’s a little bit of the past!
Hoarder? Me? No, why do you ask?
Aha, I had forgotten about that page, thanks for keeping it up to date. I think it’s useful to have the links in both places, though I agree that the Craft page is getting a bit unwieldy now that these are becoming a tradition.
Good point! I don’t want your work to be eaten by a gruesome name. [emote]:)[/emote] I also changed the section header on the IF Comp 2015 page to “Author Commentary”:
ifwiki.org/index.php/21st_An … Commentary
I was glad to see this project. I’ve enjoyed reading my competitors’ ideas.
I also think maybe the Craft IFWiki could direct to various contests, and those contests could list postmortems/commentraies etc. But that is that much more work.
It’s a good problem to have though isn’t it? That there is too much for one page.
I’ve heard folks referring to such articles as “postpartum” instead, but honestly that sounds even bloodier/squicky to me.
(Also, yeah, I got pretty frustrated with that captcha back when all I wanted to do was correct my own name on the wiki. I tried “xyzzy” and “plover” and I think maybe I composed a message to complain about it here before I thought of “plugh.”)
In past years, was there an automated process to generate stubs for the IFComp entries? This year, only 1 game has an entry so far. It’s nice to have related pages (like Doug has added) but I feel it’s important to get fundamental info in before adding too many related things.
There’s no obligation for people to get into IFWiki in general (it’s definitely harder work than adding to IFDB) but the more people can help a little bit now and then, the, uh, more it helps. I try to tweak or complete entries for games I play in general, or sometimes for games I tested or had a hand in. If you happen to be able to add an entry for your own game, that’s always great.
PS - No, I’m not going to do 55 entries. Maybe two!
-Wade
There’s never been IFWiki game-stub generation. All done by hand. (To the repeated horror of new comp organizers…)
For Wade and anyone else who’s interested in adding IFComp entries to IFWiki…
I’ve run the IFComp entries through my stub-creator. All the stubs are pasted together here.
To use, just click the “edit” tab on that page, copy or cut the stub for the entry you’re working on (the stubs are in results order) and paste it into a new ifwiki page. (Obviously the ^^^^^Wiki Stub^^^^ dividers are not meant to be included on the actual page.)
Almost all info has been automatically generated from the IFDB pages. The script doesn’t collect download links, or handle multiple authors for a single entry, but it should gather basic info like title, (one) author, authoring system, TUID, IFID, and automatically make the template for the IFComp placement. Though if a title or author has non-ASCII characters, those will show up as a “?” and need to be fixed by hand.
For the most part the stubs have not been checked for accuracy, so please confirm the details when you make the page.
If you see any recurring types of errors, please let me know because that probably means I need to tweak the script.
Thanks bg. I’m gonna give it a shot soonish.
-Wade